When the Shit Starts Flying

Literary ghosts in Michael Raeburn's film Triomf

Triomf
has been first published in 1994, in a time of the countryʼs
almost completed transition. A new order of a 'post-Apartheid South
Africa' had just been set in political terms, and more or less so in
peoples minds. The author Marlene Van Niekerk, a South African of
Boer origin herself, depicts descendants of the Dutch immigrants who
built a Christian and agrarian orientated society in the settlement
colony that later became an Apartheid state. Van Niekerk's novel,
originally written in Afrikaans, illustrates the decay of Apartheid,
exemplifying the Benades in their house as the last 'stuck' wagon of
the Boersʼ Great
Trek
— a central historical event for their settlement in South
Africa. Each of the four main characters tells the story from his or
her perspective. The plot duration is set in the very days and weeks
before the first free election, including this event as turning point
for the nation and for the family.

The
Benades are not longer landowners or part of the privileged white
community in South Africa, although one could regard their
beneficiary of social welfare (including the social housing space
they inhabit) as a privilege, compared to the millions of South
Africans without any support from the state. The parents of the
protagonists had once owned a farm, but lost it during an economic
depression, which forced them to move to Johannesburg in order to
find an employment.

The
inhabited space plays a mayor role in the peculiar mode of haunting
in the text. 'Triomf' is the Afrikaans name of the neighbourhood in
Johannesburg that the family lives in, but this district has actually
been built upon another one. Until the late fifties, the area had
been called Sophiatown, and it was well known for its culturally
vibrant scene and the mix of people. For these reasons, the Apartheid
regime gave order to demolish the entire neighbourhood. It was then
destroyed completely, against strong resistance of its inhabitants.
While most of the people were sent to live in townships outside of
the city centre ⎯ Sophiatown was the last central area
in any South African city in which persons classified as 'coloured'
did own houses ⎯ the buildings were flattened with all
remaining content. Later, 'Triomf' was built upon this levelled
ground, the name speaking for itself. This historical background sets
the novel in a sombre light: it is the space of Triomf, or rather
Sophiatown, that appears to be haunting the protagonists, however
they also go after themselves.

Failures

The
Benade's four family members are Pop and Treppie, who are in their
fifties and sixties, and the only female, Mol, perhaps in the same
age. Then there is Lambert, who is about to turn forty. Formally, he
is the son of Pop and Mol, and Treppie a ʻdistant family memberʼ
from the Cape region. But as Lambert uncovers the family secret on
the day of South Africa's first free elections, he finds out that the
older three are siblings and have had a sexual relationship since
their troubled childhood. Now he finally knows why he is different
than others, with his knobbly body and epileptic seizures. His own
pondering of his difference and the following rages liken him to a
tragic, monstrous figure. But the bitter part of the family life does
not start or end with Lamberts descent.

The
Benade's cohabitate is marked by alcoholism, social isolation, and
frequent aggressive outbursts that let Treppie and Lambert repeatedly
demolish everything they can find in the house and garden, and later
repair the very same things again and again. At one point Lambert
even shuts his mother inside of a fridge, together with some
fireworks already lit.

The
Benades do not have any friends; they regard others with both
curiosity and contempt. At times, Lambert prompts conflicts due to
his lack of social appropriateness. Neighbours look down on the four
family members, who can be seen on their veranda and in the garden
every day ⎯ drunk, desperate, and insufficiently
clothed. The only frequent visitors the family has are delegates from
both the National Party and the Jehovah Witnesses. Each of those
parties considers the family as degenerate, and the protagonists are
aware about this. The novel's irony and tragedy lies in this aspect:
the Benades represent the failure of 'white supremacy', and they know
and reflect on this. Treppie has a notable insight into their
situation and finds cynical and sometimes poetic ways to describe it.
But it does not change a thing.

The
incest continues between the siblings. Even worse is the fact that
all of the three men sleep with Mol, including her son Lambert. She
sustains this habit because she believes that the family has to be
strictly kept together. In this way, the text draws a horrible
picture of Apartheid politics from 'within'. It is explained that the
Benades had been rigidly taught to look after themselves.

'Look
after' was supposed to mean they were valuable. More valuable than
other people. Most other people couldn't look after themselves
properly. That was Old Mol's opinion in those days. She clung to that
belief, even though she knew there was something wrong with it.
What's more, it also meant that if they wanted to fight or look for
trouble, they had to do it with each other and not with other people.
A 'well-looked-after' person was someone who stayed the way he was, a
person who kept to himself, to his own kind. (Van Niekerk
2004:138-139)

There
is little surprise that the family feels haunted in their house. In a
certain way, the Benades resemble the image of a decadent family in a
haunted mansion. But their ghosts are not restless ancestors in their
own old house.

Haunting
patterns

Ghosts
do not appear as such in Triomf.
Still, the novel deals with aspects of South Africa's past that keep
on returning and even seem to have a dynamic of their own. The
present time is unsettling for the family in their home in Triomf.
As a last refuge for poor whites, the ideals of the Apartheid society
and ʻwhite supremacyʼ are already put into question. Also,
the order of the state, as a wider sense of 'home', is about to fall
apart. In this way, the living situation in the narrated space is
altogether disturbed and uncanny. The term 'uncanny' is commonly
considered to refer to the German word 'unheimlich',
defined by Sigmund Freud as something repressed re-appearing in the
familiar setting as estranged, disturbing its order. (Royle 2003)
Representing some ʻthingʼ that returns when not expected,
wanted, nor allowed to become visible, the notion does remind of the
structural changes in South Africa in the narrated time. A related
term is Heimsuchung,
among whose connotations are both 'uncanny visitation' of either a
guest or a ghost, and 'search for a home'. The notion of Heimsuchung
fits well to the events in Triomf:
something un-settling is going on in the former settlement colony.

The
past resurfaces in various ways: Lambert digs holes in the garden and
therefore produces things that once were part of Sophiatown's homes.
He collects these remainders in his own private museum. Furthermore,
the ground beneath the narrated space seems unstable. Mol often wakes
up because she hears a rumbling underneath, she can sense hollows
that originate in old mining tunnels and in the built-over ruins of
Sophiatown. This apprehension causes an uncanny feeling: Mol fears
that the house will sink in and fall downward through an endless
tunnel. This notion is consolidated in the fact that their dog's
grave sinks deeper in the ground of their garden. That is especially
unsettling for Mol. Following Jacques Derrida in Spectres
de Marx,
one of the main elements that enable haunting is mourning, which has
to be connected to a fixed place, most likely a grave (Derrida
1994:9). Otherwise there cannot be a secure situation for the dead
and the living; the line between both needs to be clear. Derrida
illustrates the importance of mourning at a certain space as in the
following:

It
consists always in attempting to ontologize remains, to make them
present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by
localizing the dead. [...] One has to know. [...]. Now, to know is to
know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it
occupies - for it must stay in its place. In a safe place. [...]
Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or
doubt: one has to know who is buried where-and it is necessary (to
know-to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there.
Let him stay there and move no more! (Derrida 1994:9)

On
many occasions, the line between the family members and their dogs
and even between living and dead dogs seems to blur. There are 'ghost
dogs' hunting for their lost homes in Sophiatown, crying nightly in
Triomf's streets. Likewise, the Benades often howl together in order
to stir up the dogs in their neighbourhood and the 'ghost dogs' of
Sophiatown. Their own two dogs are descendants of Sophiatown's ones:
When the district had been destroyed, many domestic animals were left
behind in the chaos and kept on searching for their lost homes. The
Benades had at this time visited the place and picked up two
abandoned dogs which they named after the streets where they found
them, Toby and Gerty. These names in turn go back to the daughters of
a farmer who settled in this same space long before it became part of
a city. In this way, aspects of the past are being conjured up again.
Ever since the Benades had them, the dogs reproduced (incestuous and
through rape of a policeman's sheepdog) and were repeatedly given the
same names in each generation. The deceased ones were buried in the
garden, composing layers in the ruins of their ancestor's homes.

Inside
of the Benade's house, marks of both human and animal housemates
decorate the walls: "[Y]ou'll find their personal effects all
over the house. Their spit and their blood and their breath. And paw
marks, all over the walls." (Van Niekerk 1994:359). Concerning
this modus
vivendi,
one feels reminded of how Roland Barthes enquires the term
'bestiality'. In his disquisition on various modes on how to live
together, Wie
zusammen leben,
the relationship of humans and their domestic animals can seem
ambivalent (Barthes 2007:73-74). Often, animals are treated almost
like human beings. At the same time, their natural behaviour has to
be repressed when they are trained to fit into the orderliness of a
home. Regarding animals with such a trained behaviour, the opposite
tendencies in their human counterparts seem to become more visible.
According to Barthes, one often finds features of bestiality in the
cohabiting of animals and their owners. Their co-living can raise the
question who is actually 'human' and who is 'bestial'. Regarding the
Benades, this question definitely comes up. The family's dogs do have
more rights and get more affection than their human cohabitants, as
Treppie complains. The dogs are the only ones in the house who are
not doing terrible things. But generally, the dogs represent uncanny
space in the way that they remind of the lost homes underground.
Together with the ghost dogs, which are heard howling at night, their
existence is almost subverting present time and space.

The
inward spiral

There
is a particularly uncanny dynamic in the decline of the Benades,
which is illustrated with various metaphorical images throughout the
novel. Firstly, it is shown through images of infertility. The
succession of generations comes to an end with Lambert, who cannot
find a woman and perhaps could not have children due to his
constitution. His elders (it remains unclear whether Pop or Treppie
is his biological father) worry about this, and sense the familyʼs
end in Triomf.
Similarly, the space of Triomf
is infertile. With Sophiatown underneath, there is no ground on which
anything bigger then weeds could grow. A tree's roots would have to
reach at least six feet deep to find soil, just as deep as a grave
usually is.

Another
uncanny dynamic is in the repeating prophecies about Pop's death,
which then happens as foretold. Throughout the text, he has visions
and 'visitations' predicting his death. He does not see a phantom or
ghost, but repeatedly dreams of a complete and excruciating
'whiteness' suffocating him. Ironically, he dies exactly on the day
of the first free elections, when craftsmen come to paint the
Benade's house white. One of them covers the furniture with white
cloth, together with Pop, who is overseen sleeping in his armchair.
At the same time, Lambert finds out about the family secret and
unintentionally kills Pop when ravaging in the house. He could not
make Pop out in all of the white: In the very same moment, he
inherits Pops fear of being inside of a suffocating whiteness. The
family plans to flee north 'when the shit starts flying' or 'when the
shit hits the fan' — that means, in the case of the end of
Apartheid. They fear possible consequences and that they might lose
their home, which is already a last resort for them. Lambert imagines
a 'decent life for whites' somewhere else, as if the Great
Trek
of the Boers could go on for the Benades. It is Lambert who keeps on
trying to establish normalcy and decency within their home, in spite
of his own contradictory actions. In the end there will be neither a
flight north, nor any decency. Symbolically, everything about the
Benades is growing inward and falling together.

At
one point, Treppie wonders about possible ways in which his family
could be shown on television:

He's
already warned them, one day the TV people are going to come and make
a movie about them. He's not sure what kind of a movie, a horror or a
sitcom or a documentary. He thinks they're too soft for horror and
too sad for sitcom, so maybe they're just right for a documentary.
Documentaries are about weird things like force-feeding parrots for
export. He told Lambert he'd better behave himself, otherwise they'd
come and ask him to make a special appearance on Wildlife Today.
Lambert said only threatened species got shown on that programme. The
poor fucker kids himself. (Van Niekerk 2004:129)

These
are just the reasons why an adaption of their story into a movie
script has to be challenging. Obviously, Michael Raeburn could not
shoot a documentary about the family in his film Triomf
(South Africa 2010). Still, he takes on the contradictory issues that
the novel provides. The movie depicts both the sadness and tragic
elements the family faces alongside funny action. It is not easy to
see Lambert sleeping with his mother and laugh about a funny scene a
few minutes later. But, considering the topic, it makes sense that
the audience is forced to feel uncomfortable when watching the movie.

For
a transformation of this lengthy and very dense text into the
dramatic structure a film needs, the plotline understandably had to
be fitted. Perhaps for this reason, there are some crucial changes to
the story. One of them is that the family is depicted as younger. A
series of events the film focuses are the preparations for Lambert's
twenty-first birthday. In the text, it is his fortieth birthday. But,
both in the novel and in the movie, similar events happen on this
day: Treppie hires a prostitute for Lambert to celebrate the
occasion, a coloured girl called Cleo, whom he asks to wear a blonde
wig and play the role of a good Christian Boer girl. Mol and Pop
speculate about a potential relationship that might develop from this
ʻdateʼ, and Lambert even dreams about her fleeing north
with them ʻwhen the shit starts flyingʼ. The movieʼs
plot culminates in Lambert's birthday and the following day of the
first free elections. Both dates are highly expected and feared —
while the 'date' goes terribly wrong, the political event seems to
bring rather peaceful and hopeful moments with it. Still, the ending
of the Benadeʼs story in the movie is changed into Lambert
killing Treppie and Pop in his rage.

After
Cleo got scared of Lambert during their ʻdateʼ, she insults
him and eventually runs away, leaving him alone in a seizure. When
the returning family finds him, Treppie deliberately reveals to him
their family secret, in front of the others. Treppie does so because
he could not find peace for himself, he has always been strained and
destructive because of their past and has passed this on to Lambert.
As a consequence to the revelation, Lambert starts to hallucinate his
family members as monstrous animals, leading to the deadly showdown.

This
hallucination is depicted visually, as there is a different level of
visions in the movie. They illustrate only Lambert's perspective,
especially in moments of despair. In the novel, he rather appears to
be obsessed with 'insides' in these moments. In the visions, he can
see the insides of humans and things mashing into each other. This
reflects his obsessions with interior of any kind: digging Sophiatown
up, opening up all kinds of things, and trying to look inside of
anything possible. It also fits into the chain of metaphorical
motives that Van Niekerk implemented in the text: Lambert's obsession
increases up to a seizure, which is when he can see everything and
everyone melting into each other. According to Nicolas Royle, this
can be understood as an uncanny effect.

The
uncanny has to do with the sense of a secret encounter: it is perhaps
inseparable from an apprehension, however fleeting, of something that
should have remained hidden but has come to light. But it is not ʻout
thereʼ, in any simple sense: as a crisis of the proper and
natural, it disturbs any straightforward sense of what is inside and
what is outside. The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing
and borders, an experience of liminality. (Royle 2003:2)

In
the movie, Lambertʼs visions show distorted faces and his family
members with the heads of rats. Although he is scared of what he
sees, the visualization lacks the depth and the uncanny notion of the
visions described in the novel. Also, Pop's white dreams and his
subsequent death according to them, and even the growling,
threatening, hollow ground underneath are not depicted at all in the
filmʼs visual solution. Consequently, this visualization turns
out to actually kill the ghosts that haunt in the text.